Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in bev_vincent's LiveJournal:

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Monday, October 6th, 2008
1:24 pm	The sky is falling! Okay, I was wrong. In my last post I suggested that Saturday Night Live wouldn't find much material from the VP debate last week. Instead, they came up with a hilarious 12-minute sketch that captured the essence of the 90-minute spectacular. And they were equal opportunity skewers, with Biden taking almost as many hits as Palin, and even Iffil taking a few shots. This weekend, I put the finishing touches on a short story for an upcoming contest. Since it was only 1000 words long, I was able to make numerous editing passes, then I cut myself off and sent it in, even though it's not due until next week. Enough is enough sometimes. Maybe even too much on occasion. I finished The Story of Edgar Sawtelle this weekend, too. It is a fascinating riff on Hamlet with a more downbeat ending than I was prepared for. I've seen a number of people saying they didn't want to read it because they were sure dogs were going to die. Well, some do, mostly from natural causes, but it's the human tragedy that got me. I'm working on my formal review, but I'll say this in brief: it's not a brief book. It's one that takes its time, paints a picture using a vast literary palette, and is a sheer joy to read. It has the sort-of-Western feel of Shane in places, and the adventuresome spirit of The Incredible Journey, touches of The Jungle Book, with some Jack London and Shakespeare thrown in for good measure. I'm not sure exactly what the couple did wrong to finish last on The Amazing Race this week. It's hard to put a finger on a single flaw, especially when other teams committed far worse gaffes and survived. The two divorced women could easily have been eliminated, with their pointless digging around for a non-existent container and not looking hard enough for their taxi. Or the newly dating couple, who wasted a helluva lot of time looking for the taxi stand. If the mother/son team hadn't helped them out, I think they'd still be out there looking for it. I was glad to see the woman in that relationship standing up for herself a little more with the guy, who is a major dick most of the time. I thought it was hilarious when the ex-football player kissed him when they were standing in line at the airport. He says he's going to rectify his ways, but that remains to be seen. I'm waiting for her to toss him off a cliff next time he isn't looking. Cold Case felt like it was ripped off from that Hillary Swank movie Freedom Writers. I pegged the culprit the minute they pointed out his chewing gum habit. I didn't know why, I just identified it as the kind of obvious clue that the show relies on all the time. Notice an unusual necklace or piece of jewelry somewhere? It will ultimately seal the villain's fate. All this financial turmoil is worrisome. For every piece of bad news, there's a silver lining, I guess. The US dollar has gotten strong, which means my daughter's Canadian university tuition is less expensive. At one point recently, the Canadian dollar was worth 10% more than the US dollar. Today it's worth 10% less. I focus on that and ignore the current balance on our investment accounts. Eventually things will turn around, and it will be like now never happened—for some of us, at least. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it. I caught up on taped shows from early last week over the weekend. So far, Boston Legal feels like a "greatest hits" season. Big tobacco one week, big pharma the next. The discussion at the end made it seem like they're preparing us in case this is the last season. (Aren't there time slots we haven't tried out yet? Denny asks.) (Comment on this)
Friday, October 3rd, 2008
8:56 am	Tina Fey is unemployed I'm sure she was counting on a return gig to SNL this weekend to parody last night's debate, but I don't think Palin gave her anything to work with. A lot of people tuned in expecting a meltdown or a freeze-up of some sort, and they got neither. She didn't even need to poll the audience or phone a friend. Sure, Palin was full of talking points and references to Wasilla, but she held her own. So did Biden, who stuck to the gameplan and directed his attacks at the top of the ticket, with scant reference to Palin. Of course, Palin has no real record to attack, whereas both Biden and McCain have long-standing records that could be mined for material. Her somewhat light arsenal of experience showed by her repeated returns to the same well, whereas Biden could access 35 years of political experience, including visits to Darfur, for example. Palin's folksy style is a little irritating after a while, though. I know they want her to play it up, but we're supposed to take her seriously as a potential replacement for Dick Cheney. It's hard to take her seriously. On the whole, it was an entertaining debate that people will forget in about seven days. A surprising turn of events on Survivor: Gabon. The weak team got it's shit together and won a couple of challenges. At least we got to meet the other team in greater detail at tribal council. For example, where did that dimwit in the back row come from? I think her name is Jill and she came off like a total ditz. Selective editing, perhaps, but she said what she said, though I'm not sure exactly what that was. Maybe she needed a lifeline. Phone a friend? Their quandary over who to oust was an interesting one. Ace is certainly someone they should all be afraid of, but I think they rightly decided that now was not the time to evict one of their strongest players. He does play around, though, doesn't he? Doing half gains and twists on the water slide, for example, pointless and risky showing off. Sugar was a revelation, though. Besides her choice in allying with Ace, she seems like a smart cookie. She reminds me of Cyndi Lauper. I caught up on some taped shows from earlier in the week. The Unit had one of its best episodes ever. They crammed a lot of story into that 42 minutes. The women showed their moxie, especially Bob's wife, the president proved to be one smart and resourceful cookie (think Harrison Ford in Air Force One, and the new addition to the team could expand the story possibilities to no end. The showdown between Mack and his cuckolder simmers. I'm looking forward to an exciting season. Without a Trace had some interesting moments, but it wasn't at all as billed, an episode told from the point of view of the victim. There were a few scenes from her point of view, but certainly not the whole show. I think they could write Jack out of the series to no great disadvantage. I like what they're doing with the new mommy, with her nanny cam. She goes from killing a bad guy one moment to rocking her baby the next. Private Practice is the first show I watch to address the ramifications of the mortgage collapse, and they did it in an interesting way. The show is a bit edgier than its progenitor, with some complex moral issues concerning their cases and less frivolous interactions between the characters. Sure, there's lots of drama, but it seems to be played straighter than on Grey's Anatomy. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008
1:10 pm	Law & Order: Red Dragon As I write this, Peter Straub is about to appear on One Life to Live. This isn't the first time he's shown up on the soap opera, where he plays a blind, retired cop. I've seen him at least once before, and there may have been another appearance as well. He's buddies with the actor he plays against in those scenes, and also a fan of the show. Tom Noonan was a guest villain on Law & Order: SVU this week. If that name does ring a bell, he played poor Francis Dolarhyde, aka "The Red Dragon," in the first movie adaptation of Thomas Harris's novel Red Dragon. In the TV show, he plays a pedophile who refuses to give in to his nature, or so he says. This isn't his first foray into TV crime drama. He's been on C.S.I. and Law & Order: Criminal Intent, too. The episode was pretty edgy, with Elliott going off the deep end, the new D.A. trying to gain some respect, and an overall lack of resolution to the main plot—though Munch's storyline had a nice closing moment. I received my galley of Just After Sunset today, so I have some short stories to read in the near future. Most of 'em I've read before, except for "N." and it's been a long time since I've read Cat From Hell. King's notes at the back are always amusing reading, too, as he briefly explains how each story came about. Tonight's the debate. Better'n tickets to the ro-dee-oh. The advice to the participants in today's Houston Chronicle was succinct: Avoid foot in mouth disease. Houston and Galveston are seeing real progress. CenterPoint energy reports fewer than 5000 people without power, including Galveston, and schools in Galveston are scheduled to start opening next week. That doesn't mean the recovery is completer: far from it. There are many people on the island struggling to put their lives back together again. Mold has run rampant over some of the houses in the past two weeks. The search continues for hundreds of missing people, many of whom may never be found. But it is progress. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
10:25 am	Renewed The interesting thing about House, M.D. is that it is a medical forensics program where the actual medicine is probably the least interesting part of the show. Who really cares whether the victim of the week has croup or whooping cough. What makes the show fascinating is the main character and how the patient's illness is used as a metaphor for something about one of the other characters. For example, this week's patient's secret from his wife was used as a chance to rummage around in Taub's private life. I also think that the writers finally started asking some really tough questions about the characters, like: Why did Wilson put up with House's guff for all those years? The new detective character adds a different dynamic to the show, too. I liked the discordant jam session at the end. Fringe has been picked up for a full season, and I think the show is starting to hit its stride. This week's episode may have been the best yet, and the introduction of the omnipresent ageless bald guy who has to add a ton of peppers and hot sauce to his food just so he can taste something is intriguing. The doctor continues to delight, and the episode managed to create a legitimate reason for his son to stick around. This week's Criminal Minds should have been shown closer to Halloween, as it was a great creepy borderline supernatural story. The empty grave, the messages from a killer whose execution was far from textbook and more like something out of The Green Mile. I thought the Hotch hearing problems part was a little bit overdone, but clearly it's going to be a motif for at least part of the season. I guessed why there was paper in the stab wounds early on, but I thought it was from an attempt to imitate past patterns rather than to lay out new ones. I'm about 60% of the way through The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. The book started out reminding me of something like Shane, but it gets a little edgier and speculative the farther into it I get. This morning, I finally finished the first draft of a 1000 word short story written for a no-entry-fee contest. I still have a couple of weeks to toy with it before it needs to be turned in. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008
3:27 pm	In time for Halloween I’m Going to Tell You One More Time, a reprint Halloween anthology featuring stories by Mort Castle, JG Faherty and almost two dozen others, including yours truly ("Harming Obsession"), is now on sale. The collection may be purchased for just $.99 in EZ-Read PDF or $2.99 on DVD-Video for TV viewing. You can watch Dr. Lyle Merrick’s Halloween greeting and introduction to the collection here. The collection contains 24 stories by these authors: • Sara Joan Berniker • Mort Castle • Ralan Conley • O'Neil De Noux • JG Faherty • Bruce Golden • John Grover • Jane Gwaltney • Brian A. Hopkins • Michael Kelly • Michael Keyton • John Kuhn • Barton Paul Levenson • Norma Jean Lipert • William Meikle • Scott Nicholson • Maria E. Schneider • Kristi Petersen Schoonover • Jacqueline Seewald • Martin R. Soderstrom • J.J. Steinfeld • Bev Vincent • Kaaron Warren • Donald P. Willard • A treat awaits readers at the end of most stories, where they will listen to the storyteller recall some very special Halloween memories. (Comment on this)
1:17 pm	Big deals I bought a memory stick (flash drive) yesterday. $30 for 8 gigs. Eight gigs! I was able to back up my entire "My Documents" folder onto it save for my music folder, and I still have gigs to spare. I thought about getting a USB disk drive for backups—you can get those with hundreds of gigs for a coupla hundred dollars, but I don't need that much storage, not by a long shot. Thirty bucks. Eight gigs. Amazing. We drove 12 miles round-trip with two cars last night to take advantage of an about-to-expire coupon. The deal? Seventy cents off the price of a gallon of gas. We filled up one car, kept the nozzle out of the cradle and moved the second car into position to fill it up, too. If it had been any farther than that, I probably would have balked, but it seemed worth it to save $18-$20. The NCIS team is back together again. The story last night felt a little derivative of an earlier season episode set on a submarine. In this case it was an aircraft carrier. It was good to see McGee stepping up to the plate with the director, taking the initiative. The Mentalist had an unexpected outcome last night. The show is okay—not great, but I enjoy it. I liked the fake-out with the sheriff, and the interplay between the two "couples" where there is obvious sexual tension. I posted my The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly. The book comes out in a couple of weeks. It reintroduces us to Mickey Haller, the protagonist of The Lincoln Lawyer and introduces him to his half-brother, Harry Bosch, though he doesn't know that for most of the book (though we do). (Comment on this)
Monday, September 29th, 2008
9:16 am	I love you, but... I watched Ghost Story for the first time in ages—decades—yesterday afternoon. I'm not sure how critical response was to it at the time, but it does not stand up well to age. It looks a little like a movie of the week, except for the nudity. You'd think that with icons like Douglas Fairbanks and John Houseman that you'd be treated to tour-de-force performances, but it's pretty shoddy work all around. If ever a novel deserved a second look as an adaptation, this would be one. I got back to the work of writing this morning for the first time since the storm. I revised what I had written on a short short story that I began a while back and moved onward a little as well. I also got another story back into submission and received a rejection letter, so the game continues. I think most of my coworkers have power now, and the local percentage rate for those still in the dark is around 7%. Still something over 400 people on the missing persons list on the Houston Chronicle web site, though. The "newly dating" couple on The Amazing Race has trouble written all over their relationship. His way of "correcting" her when she does something he doesn't like is to say "I love you, honey, but please don't..." The first time he did it, it seemed considerate, but then I realized it was his passive-aggressive way of ordering her around. He also makes snide comments to her, like the way he said she couldn't talk and climb at the same time when they were scaling the mesh. She ends up apologizing for her actions a lot. Looks very unhealthy to me. I was sad to see the beekeepers go so soon, since I think they would have injected a much-needed sense of humor into the race. It's funny the way the brother/sister team have adopted the separated couple as surrogate parents. It'll be interesting to see how the dynamics evolve in the coming weeks. I like this show because no one gets voted out. People eliminate themselves by failing to perform as well as the others, so there's less posturing and artifice. Though there can be some sniping and mean-spirited behavior, it's not the rule. No one is immune from one leg of the race to the next, and it's easy to go from last to first (or vice versa). Cold Case was back in its usual banal form. I'm not sure why I continue to watch the show. The characters aren't really all that interesting and the cases don't often stand out from one season to the next. I continued reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle as I watched, and am about 40% of the way through the book. I was surprised by the arrival of a James-Lee-Burkesque supernatural element to the story. The title of the book becomes clearer now, given the way that the Sawtelle's files on their dog breeding endeavors leads to a continually updated story for each dog they've raised over the years. I taped The Unit, which is on a new day this season. (Comment on this)
Sunday, September 28th, 2008
11:58 am	Two movies Though the official death toll nationwide from Hurricane Ike is something on the order of fifty, an article in today's Houston Chronicle indicates that there are over 400 people still unaccounted for two weeks after the storm passed through. Granted, some—indeed one hopes many—of these may simply be from people who don't have access to phones or other forms of communication yet, but still I expect that as the debris fields are searched and the power is restored we will discover that the toll is significantly greater than the current tally. We watched two movies yesterday. The first was a sweet little tear jerker called Definitely, Maybe starring Abigail (Little Miss Sunshine) Breslin as a precocious girl who insists that her in-the-process-of-divorcing father tell her how he and her mother met. He spins her a lively tale, with the names and some of the facts changed, about his early years. His work on the Clinton election campaigns forms the backdrop for his various romantic liaisons, including one with a character played by Rachel Weisz, who is also enamored of a philandering university prof played with gusto by Kevin Klein. I will be curious to see how Breslin fares in the coming years as a child actor, but she has serious chops at present. A mature, earnest presence. Hopefully she will avoid the pitfalls to which many others have fallen prey. Unknown (to me) Isla Fisher is a standout. Then we watched Mrs. Pettigrew Lives for a Day, staring Frances McDormand and Amy Adams. McDormand is a down-at-the-heels governess who can't hold a job and resorts to the soup kitchens of 1939 London for her sustenance. Unable to get another position, she pretends to be someone else to shoehorn her way into a job as social secretary to the character played by Adams, who is an American singer/wannabee actress who has several men on the line at the same time. The movie starts out like a French farce, with McDormand having to manage the revolving display of men to make sure they don't find out about each other. Then it settles down into a quasi-serious comedic drama as McDormand maneuvers her way though a part of society she only knows from afar, mixing and matching would-be lovers. The entire film takes place over an eventful one-day period in the shadow of World War II. Few of the characters remember war, but McDormand's character does, having lost her one true love to the previous war. Lee Pace (from Pushing Daisies) is excellent as the piano player who courts Adams' character. He had me thinking that he might truly be British, but it turns out he graduated from high school 15 miles from here, in Klein, Texas, and is an alum of Houston's Alley Theater. Adams emotes like a stage actress in the beginning, which I guess is appropriate since her character's entire life is an act. (Comment on this)
Saturday, September 27th, 2008
1:55 pm	Wrong Newman Newman's gone. No, not the one on the right, but the big one. Paul. The guy who's been part of the life of anyone who has watched movies over the past fifty-some years. Titles too many to mention. Roles from Butch Cassidy to Judge Roy Bean to Buffalo Bill, and many fictional characters to boot. We have a bottle of his brand named spaghetti sauce all ready to go this evening in tribute. I finally got to see the last six or eight minutes of the season finale of Eureka. A couple of surprises, one interesting, one possibly show-altering, though I expect they'll come up with some way of resolving it when the show returns in the winter sometime. The two hour premiere of Grey's Anatomy had some interesting bits, but it didn't exactly break much new ground. The characters are in the same state of perpetual dithering over the same old issues. The only new topic is the hospital's ranking, and what that means in the coming episodes I have no idea. The "icicle" incident was pretty much a non-event as it didn't really change anything for anyone, except for the way Christina interacted with the field doctor. The issue with Rose's announcement, shown in the promos for the new season, was a fake-out of cheap proportions. The guest stars were the best part of the show. I do wonder where all that water is coming from in the preview for next week. My review of the third Dexter novel, Dexter in the Dark, is now up. The third season of Dexter starts tomorrow night, and I have high hopes for it. The books, not so much. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 26th, 2008
11:13 am	Gabon It's one of those countries I've heard of, but know nothing about other than that it is in Africa. A quick check tells me it's on the western coast, just below the place where the continent juts westward. This is the location for the new Survivor, and it looks daunting. I guess we would have heard if anyone was trampled by an elephant or drowned by a hippo. Last night's two-hour premiere quickly revealed a fundamental imbalance in the two teams, but it was entirely due to poor strategy on the players' parts in choosing teammates. One team was smart, the other not so much. As it turned out, the oldest male is actually a pretty good asset. Think Bill Nye, the science guy, who is also a fisherman from Maine. The oldest female, on the other hand, was a liability, and I'm surprised that it took until the second vote for her to go. The Olympic athlete hasn't proven very useful yet, either. Unlike other years, I find that the personalities are emerging very fast. Not sure why that is—perhaps because we got to meet them for two hours all at once. The young guy on the weak team looks like a real klutz, which is odd for a professional gamer who should have high hand-eye coordination. What a bunch of snorers, too. Kudos to the guy who sacrificed his glasses to make fishhooks so they could eat. I know they're filming in high-def, but I don't have high def at home, so I'm not sure how much difference that makes. The show does seem to have a slightly different look to it. Because of the two-hour Survivor, I had to tape Grey's Anatomy. They overlapped. The salvage crew picked up some of the debris from our street yesterday. They sort of cherry-picked, though. They took the bundles of branches from our yard, but not the bagged leaves, for example. They took logs up to a certain size and left the rest. At least the street is looking less like a war zone. It's hard to believe that there are still people out there without power, nearly half a million of them. It's very tough for small businesses, like the dentist who has been closed for two weeks. Also tough when people on one side of a street have power and those on the other don't. The movie critic for the Houston Chronicle said he was reminded of scenes from McCarthy's The Road. There was an interesting picture at the Chronicle online showing a bunch of cattle being herded down a major street. Some 25,000 head were dislodged by the storm. Apparently they float really well because of their four gassy stomachs. Some of them ended up miles from home, and it's a major job now to match 'em with their owners. Many died, too. Here's my review of Jeff Lindsay's Dexter in the Dark, the third book in the series that inspired the Dexter TV series. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
10:58 am	The President leads into Criminal Minds. Coincidence? I'm reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. About 100 pages in. It's a very mild story at present, though it's very well written and perceptive, and we learn a lot about the characters through their actions. I'll be interested to discover why the uncle was in jail. Since I haven't read even the dust jacket yet, I have no idea if the story will extend to Edgar's adulthood, or if it's completely a story of his youth. I like reading books without knowing a thing about them. Dust jackets often reveal more than I want to know. Good to see the stock market heading in the upward direction today. My Morgan Stanley financial advisor called yesterday and he sounded like he had been though a hurricane. Oh, wait—he had. And still didn't have any power at his house. But that was minor compared to what he'd been weathering with his anxious customers. This week's House was pretty good. I wonder if the detective is going to be a continuing character. He's a little like the Mentalist. I watched Fringe, too, and it's just more of the same. I'm getting a little tired of mega-conspiracy theories and the fact that every single case they investigate ties back to the doctor's earlier research. Haven't the conspirators had a single new idea in the past two decades? Law & Order: SVU was okay, though Sara Gilbert's acting left a lot to be desired. That little kid was a piece of work. I wonder if they just loaded him up on sugar and set the cameras rolling. The plot was a bit of a mess. It's about child abuse. No, it's about drug testing on children. No, it's about rape trauma. I liked it that Munch referred back to his bar-owning days in Baltimore, which was part of his Homicide: Life on the Streets history. The captain's reaction after being asked to buy into a new bar was drolly funny. "I'll bring it up at my next AA meeting." Criminal Minds had a good debut. I was worried that they were going to pre-empt the crucial opening minutes for the presidential address, but fortunately they decided to time shift the rest of the evening's schedule. That footage of the van explosion was brutal, although Hodge looked pretty puppetish as he flew out of frame. I didn't suspect the kid as the bomber right away, but I latched onto the paramedic the instant the ambulance appeared, and I was disappointed by my perception when he delivered his patients to the hospital without doing anything evil—or so I thought. I have to wonder how Garcia kept on the line with Morgan when she was jamming all the cell phones in the area, though. Do they have some sort of super-special non-cell-phone link? And are they assuming that because the head of the group is gone that the cell isn't worth pursuing? They left without investigating further. I watched last week's episode of Eureka! on their website and then this week's season finale from my DVR, except there seems to have been time-shifting going on there, too, as I missed the last 6 minutes. The bomb went off, and then that was it. I'll have to wait for that one to go up on their website, too, so I can see how it was resolved. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
9:17 am	Couch potato Today marks a safe point for Texas vis-a-vis hurricane season. Since the 1850s, only three hurricanes have ever struck Texas after Sept. 24. Of course, since 1989, zero hurricanes had struck where I lived before now, so we can't say we're completely in the clear, but we can breathe easier. Ike probably isn't a topic of conversation for many people outside of the region, but it's still the number one thing on people's minds around here. One of my coworkers just had her power restored last night, and over half a million people are still without power. On top of that, a quarter of a million people in the region don't have running water. One of the things that made the early days after the storm more tolerable was the fact that we didn't have to worry about water. We could drink it, and thanks to a gas-powered hot water heater, could take hot showers. I had filled our tub before the storm in case we lost water and needed it to flush the toilet, but I drained it the day after the power came back on. It may be November before all of the traffic signals in Houston are working again. 1200 signals are still out—dark, not flashing red—making parts of the city hazardous to drive in, especially after dark. If you don't know an area, you could zoom right through an intersection without realizing it has a signal. Residents start returning to Galveston today to look and leave. They are advised to beware of mosquitos, rats and poisonous snakes, and should have tetanus shots before starting to explore their properties. There are absolutely no resources on the island. Last I heard there was one working gas pump at one station. No water, power, food, etc. Residents will need to hire electricians to certify their buildings ready for power and then get permits from the city before there's any hope of being reconnected. Ditto for gas—all gas meters were destroyed and will have to be replaced. It's hard to believe that a city that's only 75 miles away is basically dead at the moment. On life support, at least. I watched Boston Legal from tape, and it looks like the season is off to a rousing if uninnovative beginning. Tackling big tobacco isn't exactly ground-breaking. The preview for next week looks interesting though. Tuesday nights are busy nights for TV and DVR. I decided to tape House, Fringe, and SVU and watch the CBS trio. I also taped the mid-season finale of Eureka, and I missed last week's episode so I need to wait for that one to go online first. NCIS found an intriguing way to solve the "let's break up the team" cliffhanger, though there will be at least one more week before they're all back on dry land together. I guessed the surprise ending after the scene in the store room. I wonder if that will be an ongoing part of the season or just something that comes up every now and then. The Mentalist was pretty much what I expected. The lead actor is going to carry this show. The story itself wasn't all that challenging. As soon as the main character started noticing things in the doctor's office, I knew who the culprit was. Also, the fact that the part was given to a recognizable actor made it unlikely it was a bit part. I really liked the ending, because it said an awful lot about the character—more than we'd learned during the rest of the episode. Steven Webber joined Without a Trace as the problem fixer. It's unclear what Jack's role is any more. Has he been demoted to being a peer with his former team? It's clear they will all continue to treat him as if he was their boss (the same way McGee continued to think of Gibbs as "boss" on NCIS). I like his scenes with the therapist. She's an excellent character, unafraid to call "B.S." on Malloy. The case was an interesting one, too. They packed a lot of story into the episode. Webber isn't my favorite actor, but he seems okay in this role. He has to play it absolutely straight, no mugging or clowning and he pulled it off. I haven't been writing much lately. I get up and spend my mornings doing paperwork more than anything else. I had one story returned to me last night that has been out for a long, long, time, so I reread it this morning before researching a new market for it. I only changed a few words, then printed it out, prepared the cover letter and SASE, the printing labels, etc. and that pretty much took up my time. I have three things on my to-do list with hard deadlines, but they're all far enough away that I haven't done much with them yet. I have ideas for at least two of them, but this hurricane disruption put me off my game for a while and I'm only slowly finding my way back. What I really want to do is start the next novel, but I haven't heard back from my agent yet on the current one, and I fully expect there will be work to do on that one shortly and I don't want to get too deep into something new only to have to put it aside for weeks or months. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008
9:45 am	Ike tidbits I've had The Story of Edgar Sawtelle on my to-be-read pile for a couple of months and I finally picked it up earlier this week. So far it is a sedate story about a family on a farm where the eponymous young boy can hear but can't speak. It also has a lot of dogs in it. I haven't read the dust jacket or any reviews, so I have no idea what it's going to be about in the long run beyond Edgar's interesting life as a boy who can't speak. And dogs. Last night I watched the three CBS comedies that were returning for new seasons, but I skipped the new one, Worst Week, because I wasn't all that impressed by the ads and I figure they'd already shown us the good bits anyway. I haven't heard much positive about it, so I guess it was a good choice. I've decided that the funniest scenes from Big Bang Theory are when Sheldon is with Penny. Or Leonard. Or Koothrappali. Or Howard. How I Met Your Mother was good, and the reveal at the end of Two and a Half Men was wicked. I wonder if it will be a one-off or a continuing thread this season. I recorded the return of Boston Legal. I caught up with Raising the Bar via OnDemand. The third episode was the best so far, with a favorable verdict leading to a deeper dilemma regarding a mental ill defendant. I got another one of those close-but-no-cigar rejection letters yesterday. This one was from the ITW's second thrillers anthology. The editors really liked it, but they were only picking two or three stories from out of over 100 responses to the open submissions, so the odds weren't in my favor. They strongly encouraged me to place the story elsewhere, but the markets for a 5000-word thriller story are few and far between. I'll try the usual suspects after learning the outcome of my current submissions with them. Ever seen a transformer explode? Here's one going up during the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. And here is a cool video of some guys on a boat in Galveston Bay during the hurricane. And here's Geraldo Rivera getting knocked on his ass by Ike. (Comment on this)
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
9:46 am	Lost in the shuffle I would say that we are pretty much back to normal both at home and at work. I know that some of my neighbors and co-workers are still without power, though. Some things inside the house got shuffled around while the power was out—they're slowly finding their way back to where they belong. Candles perched in various places. Extension and phone cords draped over chairs and countertops. Batteries strewn about. Things unplugged. Stuff like that. I went on a big grocery run to restock our fridge, which for the past several days has held only margarine, milk, maple syrup and ice. Cut up trees, bags of debris and bundles of limbs still line the streets, which makes them seem very narrow. School started back up again this morning in many places. A lot of people are now having to deal with insurance companies or getting fallen trees removed. We found half a shingle in our front yard. We're not sure it's ours, but we will have to have the roof inspected at some point. Once things return to normal, probably. Whatever that is. I haven't been to the gym in 10 days, so I think today's the day to get back into the routine. I'm still trying to settle back into my writing regimen. This weekend I mostly took care of organizational matters. Got some stories submitted to new markets, wrote a proposal for a non-fiction piece, worked on a book review. One piece of news that sort of got lost in the shuffle during the past week was Rick Wright's death from cancer. Pink Floyd has formed part of the soundtrack of the last thirty years of my life, ever since I "discovered" them during my first year at university. I hadn't heard that he was sick, so his death came as a sad surprise. I also read this morning that Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of the Anne of Green Gables books, died from suicide after suffering depression. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 21st, 2008
9:28 am	Ghost town I received a rejection letter from Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine yesterday. It was a form rejection that claimed they didn't have time to make personal responses...but at the bottom there was a handwritten personal response. The editor told me she liked the story a lot and hoped to see more from me. So, of course I sent them another story immediately. Strike while the iron is hot. I also found a new market for the story that I'd received a rejection letter for during Ike week. I read Dexter in the Dark yesterday, the third of Jeff Lindsay's novels. It goes in a direction I didn't care for that much. If I had been the book's editor, I would have suggested lopping off everything in italics, for starters. The book could have been a decent mainstream crime novel, but the demonic aspects Lindsay chose to introduce diminished it, in my opinion. I'm also not a fan of what he's doing with Rita's kids, either. I finally got to see The Closer's season finale. The ending was the tensest fifteen minutes I've seen on television in ages. The beginning was just silly, with Brenda acting like a dimwit over her purse. The show redeemed itself from the moment they arrested the kid in his house, though. We went to see Ghost Town last night. I've never seen Extras or The Office. My only previous exposure to Ricky Gervais was a long, awkward bit he did during the Diana tribute last year, trying to fill in time when one of the bands was setting up. This is a very good film. Greg Kinnear is becoming one of the most reliable actors around, and Téa Leoni was rock solid in the kind of role that suits her. She doesn't do well with some of the slapstick parts she's had recently, but as a foil to Gervais—terrific. And Gervais himself, wow. Doing the stuff he does, with the conversational retreats and redirections, the awkward rambles to get himself out of trouble but only digging himself farther in, can't be at all easy. The scene between him and Kristen Wiig (the surgeon) when she was stepping all over his dialog has fantastic comedic timing. I wonder how many takes that took to perfect. The movie has the obligatory tear-jerker scenes at the end, and the also-obligatory shock ending that isn't, but we really enjoyed the film, and the rest of the audience (packed house) seemed to as well. (Comment on this)
Friday, September 19th, 2008
4:57 pm	One week later This time last week we were watching the tides lap onto the coast at Surfside and Galveston, wondering what the night held in store for us. We fared much, much better than many. Some of my coworkers are still without power, some have serious damage to their homes to contend with. People in the area had cars and homes flattened by falling trees. Others have flooding. Some have both. And that's just up here, well away from the coastal deluge that has people wondering what they have to return to, if they're ever allowed to return. I watched the last two episodes of this season of Burn Notice last night. I have to say that I liked the individual episodes of season two, but I wasn't impressed with the somewhat teasing vector of the season. Last season ended with the promise of information about the burn, but season two didn't deliver at all. Instead, we had two mysterious characters who puppeted Michael around while he simultaneously handled matters for everyone he knows. His relationship with Fee percolated but didn't evolve, despite significant glances in the finale. It's a show with a difficult premise to handle, ultimately. Sort of like the upcoming The Ex-list. Unless the protagonist had hundreds of lovers, it's hard to see how the show can last for long without outliving its premise. How many years can they drag us around with Michael as he searches for the reason why he was burned? Still, it's a great show on an episode-by-episode basis. Mad Men is all over the map. This week's episode had three parallel plots that involved the lack of power of women. Don's wife is trying to figure out what to do about her suspicions that Don has been unfaithful (if she only knew the magnitude of his infidelity). Peggy got co-opted into working for the parish priest, trying to counter the rigidity of the old guard while attempting to appeal to the youth and fend off the priest's nosiness. And, finally, Joan was given a chance to excel at a new task only to have it ripped out of her hands and passed on to some yokel. (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 18th, 2008
1:07 pm	Back on the grid Home: has power, water, phone, internet, the whole deal. There's even a bar or two on my cell phone. Work: has power, water, phone, internet, everything except our web server. Things are getting back to normal. Traffic lights turn red, yellow and green instead of flashing red or being completely blank. Stores are opening. People probably don't have to wait in line for 1-4 hours for gas. Not everyone is so lucky, so we consider ourselves very fortunate. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
8:35 am	Lions and tigers, oh my As if the people on the Bolivar Peninsula didn't have enough to worry about, a lion and a tiger got loose during the storm. News reports this morning say that they have been "corralled," which doesn't quite sound like "caught" to me. The tiger is supposedly tame, but if it's been without food for the better part of a week I'm sure it's looking at human beings with a much different eye than before. I read Isabel Allende's Zorro during those long, powerless days. It's a very good book, an origin story for the masked man with the sabre. Historically rich, it pulls in conditions in California, Barcelona and even manages to get Jean Lafitte into the story. I watched the second episode of Fringe online last night. I'm still on the fence about the show. I like the old guy—he's a delightful character—but the science is so wonky that my training rebels against it and I'm not exactly sucked in to the premise yet. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 17th, 2008
9:02 pm	We've got the power Now all we need is phone services. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
12:24 pm	Photos Here are the pictures I took a few hours after the storm passed through. It was still drizzling at the time, hence the occasional spots on the photos. This one is around the corner and up a cul-de-sac from us. The owner had just taken her dog outside to do its business and went back in a couple of minutes before the tree toppled, narrowly missing their truck. It seems like the "back end" of the storm is what did most of the damage. The restaurants and businesses on piers extending out from the Galveston seawall that were obliterated went after the eye passed through, and the tree we heard falling also went after the eye was past us. Our back yard was very soggy, and the ditch out front was almost level with the road, but we were in no risk of flooding. We seem to be just high enough to avoid that no matter how bad the storm. A couple of the pictures are of the storm drains at the intersection of two discharge outlets. They looked like miniature whirlpools. (3 Comments |Comment on this)